Selling the House – Chapter 5

We conclude the story…

We were the first to arrive at the bank, a little early perhaps, and our inquiring looks as we scanned the tellers and patrons went unreturned. No one in the small lobby was expecting us. The two bank officials important enough to have offices, but not trustworthy enough to have something more opaque than smoked glass for walls, sat behind desks in earnest conversation with suited clients. We deduced that the location had been chosen for the convenience of the buyer’s lawyer, and we would just have to await his arrival. So we sat and tried, unsuccessfully, to find diverting reading material. In comparison to the dog-eared, glossy magazines of a doctor’s office, the pamphlets on mortgages, money market accounts, and interest-free checking were rather dry.

I let Dawn have the only chair in the place while I chivalrously stood nearby, a hovering protecting spirit. As no good deed goes unpunished, it wasn’t long before she said, “Harry, go ask that teller if they have any more of those piggy banks. You know, the one Samuel dropped on Fourth of July?”

I knew. This was a small town that still held a rousing Fourth of July parade that drew an audience large than the town’s population. The bank had given out soft piggy banks, which Sam had loved and then subsequently dropped as Dawn carried him back to the car after dark, asleep on her shoulder.

I also knew my wife. She delights in asking me to do small favors she can do perfectly well herself. True, I was already standing and she was sitting, and it would have churlish to expect her to vacate the seat I had just insisted she take. But the truth is, she is shy of both phones and strangers, so the choice was between futile, boorish nagging or getting it done.

A coiffed tween behind the counter invited me forward from the line. “Oh, the piggy banks? Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said with a sad look, as if I just told her my dog had died. Her patronizing tone slid up and down by perfect fourths and bounced off the walls of the small lobby. “They were none left. We gave them all away during the parade. I mean, I could go look in the back, but I’m fairly sure their all gone.”

“No, don’t bother. Thank you anyway.” I scuttled through a gauntlet of indulgent smiles back to our neutral corner and, crouching by the chair, murmured to Dawn, “They’re all out.”

“So I heard,” she murmured back.

Our lawyer arrived, in a soft brown business suit adorned with reading glasses on a necklace of polished river stones. She ushered us into an unoccupied conference room with the same floor-to-ceiling, fish-bowl windows. The table was ample enough for a formal dinner party, but we all huddled together along one side, politely relinquishing the “seats of honor” at each end. Though the chairs seemed more “dutiful” than “honorable”. These were modern New England business chairs, deeply rooted in Puritan virtues of fortitude and stamina. No executive springs or wheels, no imitation leather or bulging lumbar support. A simple, square metal frame barely disguised by insufficient padding and gray fabric upholstery, with four no-frills, stainless steel legs, thick as rebar, that speared the carpet below. Such a chair did not turn or waver. Such a chair forced ethical choices. Sit up straight, keep all your feet on the floor, and decide once and for all which direction you were going to face.

There was nothing extraordinary about the business we were going to conduct, but our lawyer beamed quietly. And why shouldn’t she beam. She was a grandmother, with a distinguished local career, a large house with a paid mortgage, and a grown-up child in the family business. She handed us papers – legal documents, her final bill, disclaimers and declarations. We sauntered through the pile, signing our names and chattering in undertones like school children in the back pew at church.

The buyer soon entered, slender and ethereal and out of place. She looked around the room with a shy smile. She seemed embarrassed by how much space she took up, and she tried to shrink her five foot ten frame. She wished us a drawling Good Morning. This was the first time she had ever bought a house on her own. Her nose positively twitched her desire for acceptance and her shoulders shrugged disbelief. She sat across the table from us, oozing quiet enthusiasm and nervousness.

At last Finn, her lawyer, arrived, a clean-shaven, suited fellow, with a sufficient amount of gray hair and an ample chin and paunch reflecting his distinguished position as a pillar of the legal bar. He assumed the role of master-of-ceremonies and dispelled the archival hush with a endless flow of dry, cynical, good-natured talk. He began to go through papers with his client, much as we were doing, while asking questions, swapping stories, and reminiscing.

“Did you give her the lead paint disclosure?”

“Yes, here it is,” we answered. “We really have no knowledge of lead paint, but all the interior walls were repainted in the last five years.”

“What is this?” the buyer asked.

“A useless piece of paper that you are legally entitled to read and recycle.”

“Finn, did you hear about the new bill before the legislature? Introduced by our friend Mrs. C?” our lawyer asked.

“Oh God. What now?”

“Aside from lead, it would require all sellers to provide buyers with a complete disclosure of a dozen other substances, along with pamphlets describing in detail the various health and safety hazards associated with it.”

From their mutual noises of disgust, they clearly thought this a terrible idea, but as a layman and a consumer I could not understand why? This must have shown on my face. “It would triple the amount of paper work,” she added, turning to me and holding up the half inch stack we had already worked through, “most of which will end up unread, recycled or in the landfill.”

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” said Fin. “You know, when I was a kid, my dad use to keep a old jam jar full of mercury, and sometimes he’d give it to us to play with, just to get us kids out his hair.”

The buyer blinked, and then added, not without a self-mocking sense of caveat emptor, “Well, I guess that explains a lot about you.”

Having started earlier, we finished our pile of papers sooner and sat back to enjoy the show. Finn and the buyer worked their way through their stack, occasionally passing a document to us to countersign. Finn would explain a document’s purpose in clear prose, discuss the nitty gritty with our lawyer in their legal argot, and then entertain us with some histoire while the buyer signed. Not a bad way to make a living. When the next paper was revealed, he held onto it and switched to a more formal tone than before.

“OK, before you sign this, I have to ask this officially. And you have to say ‘yes’ to make this legal and official, you understand?”

She swallowed whatever witty statement was at the end of her tongue as she realized his tone was, if not serious, then at least not as careless as before.

“Do you sign this document of your own free will?”

Good God? Was he really allowed to ask her this at this late stage in the game? We had cancelled our insurance policy. We had given up our children’s slot at the Montessori school. We had missed the deadline for pre-buying heating fuel for the winter. This was not time for cold feet. Fortunately, I hardly had time to hold my breath, before she answered, “Yes.”

I blew out my breath. “Finn,” I said, “At this point in the process … I mean … does anyone ever say no?”

Finn slid his reading glasses to a well-worn slot on the end of his nose and turned to face me – not an easy trick in those particular chairs. But the twinkle in his eye told me the serious part was over.

“You know, about once every five years, someone does say No.”

He leaned back in his chair, and held up a finger. “I remember this one couple I was helping through the process, and there hadn’t been any indication of a problem or hitch the whole time, a very routine sale, until I said, ‘Do you sign this document of your own free will?’ And she yelled, ‘NO!’ and pointed at her husband with her thumb,” and he demonstrated with his own thumb.

At this point Finn mimicked an angry and bitter woman defaming her spouse. “‘We wouldn’t be here if Mr. Awnt-er-pen-ure here hadn’t had his great, never-fail business idea. And what you think that might be? Come on. Guess. No, don’t guess. You’ll never guess. A tire center! In Vermont! Isn’t that brilliant. Who would ever think to put up a tire center in Vermont! Would you think of that? Of course, you would. How many tire centers are there within twenty miles of here? Lots! But Noooo! Come on, honey, it’s a sure bet. He insisted. We’ll make a ton of money. We can’t lose. Argh! We owned that beautiful house outright and now we have to take out a mortgage just to pay off the losses. I could just SCREAM every time I think of it. And if you think you can…’

“On and on and on she went, while her husband sank in his seat and turned an odd shade of pale gray. I thought she wasn’t ever going to finish. I must have waited ten minutes for her to calm down, until finally she huffed in disgust, ‘Yes, I sign this document of my own free will.’ and then immediately turned to her husband and said, ‘I am NEVER going to let you live this down!’”

The paperwork was completed, and as we shook hands all round, Finn handed us the largest check I ever expect to see in my life. Outside the building, the buyer hugged us, thanked us, and wished us well, and we sincerely returned her emotions. In a couple of months, she would be sending us increasingly anxious and frustrated emails when the basement flooded in one of the wettest summers the state had seen in living memory. But at that moment, we were all pleased with the transaction and relieved it had come off smoothly. She walked off in high spirits, a great burden off her shoulders.

We were now legally homeless, and our future had enough uncertainty that we weren’t completely care-free, but it’s hard to be anxious with a five-digit check for in your hand. Or rather, it’s a different kind of anxiety.

“We need to deposit this RIGHT AWAY!” I insisted.

“OK gang. Let’s go!” Dawn said, in her best up-and-at-’em voice.

“Should we walk or take the car? It’s kind of a far walk, but we have a free parking spot right now.”

“Harry, look at the dollar amount on that check you are holding in your hand. And you’re trying to save yourself twenty-five cents in the parking meter?”

“I am my Mother’s son, but you’re right. Let’s drive.”

In retrospect, it’s embarassing to admit when you have lived a cliche, but at the time we laughed all the way to the bank.

 

Spit Goes Clink

We lost power last night, from about 1:30 in the morning until 7:30.

 

Without electricity we have no lights, no heat (gas furnace controlled by electric thermostat), and no water (well pump is electric). I am writing this at 10:00 AM, and it is -14 Fahrenheit outdoors (yes, that says negative fourteen, or as Rose says, “megative fourteen” because it is worse than negative), so I don’t know how cold it was outside in the middle of the night. I shudder to think of it. Or maybe shiver. The house isn’t quite back up to operating temperature. We still have condensation frost on the inside of the windows.

 

I got up, found a flashlight, and called the power company. I left a message on their automated system and waited. I lit a few candles and read for a while, but after an hour, the temperature was noticeably dropping in the house. Samuel had a cold and woke easily, and so he ended up in bed with us, ensuring that neither Dawn nor I would get any sleep. I was up and down a number of times, unable to sleep but too tired and, increasingly, too cold to want to get up. We piled fleece blankets on the children and ourselves. Rose grunted when I asked if she was OK, but her head and hands feet felt warm.

 

And then I realized that if the house froze, there would be burst water pipes to deal with.

 

It was 4:00 in the morning. I called our landlady, but she didn’t know how to drain the water out of the pipes. She would try to find out and call me back.

 

“Meanwhile, can you leave some water running to keep the pipes from freezing?” she asked.

 

“No, the well pump is electric.”

 

“Oh… Yeah… Darn.”

 

I called the electric company and heard the reassuring recorded message that said there was a power outage in our area (and six other places) and crews were dealing with it. Later, I would feel very, very bad for those crews. But not right at that moment. At that moment, I wanted to urge them on with a cat-o-nine tails.

 

I also wanted to know how dire the situation was. At first I thought to get some water from the water cooler and stick an instant read thermometer in it. But then a few sluggish neurons woke up enough to say, “Hey stupid. Get the flashlight and look at the thermostat,” before rolling over back to sleep.

 

The thermostat read 60 degrees. 60 degrees? But it felt so cold in the house!

 

We decided to get ready to evacuate anyway, which raised another problem. The car was 75 yards away in a locked, detached garage. The garage door opener was electric and could not be opened from the outside. We would have to get inside the garage and manually open it, but the man door was locked and we didn’t know if we had a key. I put on fleece pants, a silk turtleneck, snow pants, fleece sweater, winter coat, a neck gaiter, Sorrell snow boots, a fleece touque (as our neighbors to the north say), and a down winter coat, and I walked outside with all the keys we could find in the house.

 

It occurred to me that this might be my first chance to have my spit freeze in mid-air, but I was too chicken to find out. I didn’t want my lips to freeze together.

 

We live on a “vacation” lake, so only a couple of house on our block still have people living in them at this time of year. However two doors down, I saw a station wagon with its lights on and my neighbor moving in and out. I went over to talk to him and found out that he was going to drive seven miles to town and look for a generator. His wife was leaving in their other car to drive to Fort Wayne and go to work three hours early. He asked if I had a cell phone, and I said yes, but it got no signal at the lake. Too bad, he said. He wanted to call ahead and see if anyplace was open. Why don’t you use your regular phone I said? He looked puzzled and then realized what I meant.

 

“All my phones are cordless and they need to be plugged into a socket to work.” I offered my phone but he decided to just go. But he did help me get my car out first. Turns out I did have a key to open the man door, and fortunately he was there to help because to open the garage door, we had to pull on two separate metal flaps, one on each end of the garage door.

 

So the car was available for a quick get away, if need be. I came inside, and was about to crawl back in bed when the landlady called back. She had not found out how to drain the water, but she was going out to buy a portable generator. I told her that the house was now at 55 degrees so there wasn’t any immediate danger.

 

I crawled into bed. Even Samuel’s involuntary spasms and twitches and kicks couldn’t keep me awake. But at 6:30 he woke up, as he does every morning, and wanted to get up and play. We said no about as firmly as we say No about anything, but he kept pleading until finally I said, “Sam, come with me.”

 

We had already covered him in fleece and warm layers, so I walked him into the room where all his toys were. It was very, very dark.

 

“Sam, the electricity is out. There is no power in the house. Do you think you can play out here in the dark?”

 

No answer. We went back to bed until the power came on at 7:30 in the morning. We gave a feeble cheer, and then I took Samuel to the playroom and fell asleep on the couch, wrapped in blankets.

 

An hour later, Rose woke up. She had no idea what had happened during the night, but she was pleased to hear that school had been cancelled for the day.

 

Selling The House – Chapter 4

And now for the reaction from the parents.

“So that’s when she told me she didn’t want to pay our asking price.”

“Wait. You were just about to sign the contract, and then she wants to negotiate a new price?”

“Yup.”

“That’s chutzpah.”

I was on the phone with my Dad. This is the weekly, grandparent update, formerly the weekly dutiful-son update until I had children. In the dutiful son years, Mom always answered the phone, but now Dad has retired, so he hears the news first.

Because he is my father and I his son, I unwittingly force the role of father confessor upon him. I am old enough to be past this phase of our relationship, but I still value his approval. It is a deeply ingrained habit, not a conscious choice. I tell him what we are doing with our lives, and if I fail to amuse him or make him laugh, I naturally assume he disapproves. Then I begin to make my justifications until he really does disapprove.  That’s when he puts Mom on the phone. 

This neurotic anxiety is pointless. For his part, my father has no tolerance for being a confessor. Having suffered a heart attack and survived triple bypass surgery, he is unwilling to jeopardize his blood pressure with the specific details of his grown-up children’s foolishness. Ignorance is longevity. Fortunately Mom is much healthier and has no such qualms.

“So, what did she offer you?”

I told him.

“But … wait … that’s not very different from what you asked.”

“No, it isn’t,” I agreed

“Hmm. OK. And what did you counter?”

“I didn’t counter.”

“What?”

“I didn’t counter. I accepted it.”

Really though, I almost did not accept the offer, but I didn’t tell Dad this. At the time, I was angry at being manipulated. But this anger was blunted by two considerations.

The first was that, for the first time, her voice lost that spiritual, unconcerned quality. It momentarily gained a harsh note of someone pressing an advantage that they are not sure truly exists, someone a little bit scared. It made her very human and vulnerable, and it reminded me that we didn’t have to sell the house. I could not be manipulated against my will. Plan B was simply to stay in New England, which we loved anyway, live on a tight budget, and send our children to public school instead of Montessori. As it turned out, Plan B was not economically feasible, but I didn’t know it at the time, because the national economic melt down was still months away.

The second consideration was that the price she offered was not very much less than the asking price. In fact, it was a very amateurish negotiation on her part, and it sealed her convincing role of a novice home buyer. My impression was this was a unconscious self-help maneuver whose only point was to bolster her faltering confidence. She wanted to prove to herself that she had some control and was not being taking advantage of by me. I was willing to forego some profit to buy some goodwill and smooth out the process, which turned out to be useful later. And in the big picture, the money was a only a very little skin off my considerable nose. Dad didn’t think so.

“You didn’t give a counter offer?”

“No, why would I do that?”

“You’re supposed to counter, to meet her half way. That’s how you negotiate.” Dad insisted.

“Well, it seemed kind of pointless to do so. It was still within the range Dawn and I agreed was what we wanted. Frankly we just want to …”

“Let me get your mother on the line.  Ceci!”

One for one. Now to find something with which to disappoint Mom. The house sale wouldn’t do it, but she’s not thrilled about us moving in the first place so this shouldn’t be difficult. I could at least expect some unsolicited advice, or even better, a sigh and a parting shot like, “Well, it’s your life.”

Two thousand miles away, I heard my mother’s voice across the condo, “What?” It was a familiar voice from my childhood, a surprisingly effective roar from a small woman that developed while raising four boys and has since then been continually exercised by a husband who refuses to wear his $300 hearing aids.

“Get on the phone! It’s your son!”

“Which one?”

“The one in Vermont!”

I heard her footsteps echo on the reddish-brown hardwood floors. With the exception of the bathrooms, there was not a single door or ceiling on any of the walls in their condominium. “Harry! How are you?”

“Great Mom. We have a buyer for the house.”

“Oh that’s wonderful! Did you get what you wanted?”

“Yes,” and before she could ask how much, “A very nice woman, a friend of some neighbors, and she seems anxious to get all the legal work done quickly.”

“That’s great! When do you move?”

“We have a six weeks to pack.”

“And do you know where you’re going?”

“Still the Fort Wayne area.”

“I know that. Don’t you have a house there?”

“No, not yet. We want to rent for a year before we consider buying land.”

“Oh good. That’s smart. I was worried you were going to invest your money and then not be able to get out if you didn’t like it. And where will you rent?”

“Don’t know yet. We are going to take a UHaul and drive out there and look for a rental when we arrive.”

“You … You don’t know where you’re staying yet?”

“Um, no. I mean, yes. We have a place to stay for a week or two. It’s at the school actually, a sort of B&B, only they don’t serve breakfast, More like just a B. With a large kitchen. It’s only while we look for a rental.”

Silence. No Response. Have I succeeded? Clearly she is not pleased with this plan.

“But what will the children do in the meantime?”

“They’ll be with us. It’s summer vacation, they don’t have to be in school. And I do believe you offered to come up and keep an eye on them.”

“Well, yes, so you could unpack. You won’t be able to unpack until you find a rental.”

“You’re right, but what can we do? We don’t have to time or money to take an extra trip there, and we need to pack now.”

A silence. A sigh.

“Well, I suppose you know best.”

 

Selling The House – Chapter 3

We continue our flashback series from Spring 2008, when we were selling our house.

A woman called and wanted to see the house. She happened to be just round the corner, visiting a friend of hers, a neighbor we met from time to time and whose property I had once trespassed upon the previous winter, driving a deep gash through their pristine snow. Yes, the house was still available. Yes, she could see it. No, tomorrow, not today.

In fact, the house was ready to receive visitors that day, but we were not. It was already the end of the day and there was nowhere for Dawn to take the children, even if we were inclined. She did not express any displeasure at the inconvenience, and said tomorrow would be fine, though she might drive by and look at the outside.

Her voice had a dreamy quality – rather more spiritual than hallucinogenic - but practical and down to earth. With a judicious use of pauses and inflection, she conveyed a broad range of feeling within a minimal register. As I soon learned, taking her on the now familiar tour of the premises, she was a school librarian and so was not easily flustered. Nothing phased her, not even my disclosure of the wet basement. She simply nodded her head, her thin arms crossed as she considered the foundation with a look that betray nothing - not understanding, not ignorance, not even interest. Like previous visitors, the rooms and windows delighted her, as did the location, and she soon came back for additional visits with her college-aged daughters and the requisite “friend who knew something about house construction.”

She liked the neighborhood, loved the house, agreed the price was reasonable, and despite not truly understanding the process of buying a For Sale By Owner home, she agreed to make an offer. We set a date to draft a purchase and sales agreement and get the process started. That night, Dawn and I ordered out for dinner.

The following afternoon I waited in the kitchen. The day was sticky and unreasonably hot for early June, and like many New England homes, we had no air conditioning. I was telepathically chivvying Samuel into his bathing suit and out the door with Rose and Dawn.  They were going to cool off in the pool and leave me to negotiate the sales and purchase agreement in peace. A weak puff of air moved through the window screens, and I felt an impossible shiver as the sweat on the back of my neck cooled a degree. Dawn was gathering towels and goggles and sunscreen into a large, blue, net bag, and while she rummaged in the drawers, I said, “You know, I really shouldn’t complain. My family in Atlanta has been dealing with this heat and humidity for three months already.”

Dawn glanced in my direction with a sardonic expression. “Your family is suffering terribly in their air-conditioned fortresses.”

“Yes, poor devils.”

To be fair it had only been two days of unseasonable misery. A high pressure system lay over New England like a magnifying glass whose focal point rested twenty feet over our roof. Nighttime brought some relief, but not enough to sleep comfortably. One expected this in July, a week or two of sweat-soaked sheets, thin blankets tossed early to the floor, cranky children refusing to drink enough water, and several trips to the city pool and maple creemies. The human creature can withstand any amount of discomfort if it can be accepted in the natural order of things, a compromise or sacrifice for a perceived purpose. In our case, a week of misery in July is a small price to pay for living in New England, a price we could choose to pay in electric bills if we wanted to install an air conditioner. But four months of this was not part of the bargain.

Dawn and the children vanished to the pool before the buyer arrived. I offered her ice water which she gratefully sipped and held to her tanned, stretched skin, glistening with perspiration. We chatted for a bit, quickly digging down, as Americans will do, to an acceptable level of personal intrusion. I gave her the short account of our reasons for moving and life as an older parent of young children, while she summarized a divorce, an impending surgery, and an ill family member. We sipped our ice water and watch the sky darken with what promised to become a cooling thunderstorm. The wind rose outside and squeezed through the open windows to rustle the blank contract on the table. On cue, we picked it up and began the process of working our way through the legal language and filling in the blanks.

She asked questions about everything, and though she seemed to understand only fragments of the process, she listened attentively and without anxiety as I did my best to explain and decipher security deposits, inspection clauses, and financial pre-qualification. When she asked questions, they were pertinent, and I found her absolute calm unnerving.

A familiar sound outside brought my glance up from the contract. Out the front windows, I saw Dawn returning in the minivan, parking on the street rather than the garage. She must have forgotten something important at home, perhaps Rose’s epipen, and I imagined she would run in and out with no more than a hushed “don’t mind me”  – guaranteed to make us do so – as she passed. But it was the children who came running in, flushed, excited. Rose was chattering. Samuel was in tears.

“There’s a tornado watch!” Rose said, loudly enough to heard across the length of the house, though she was only twelve inches from my ear. Samuel’s screams were louder yet, and as he clung to my leg, it took some time for me to understand his words.

“Papa. I’m scared of the tornado!”

Dawn was nowhere to be seen. She was not visible outside. She had not come in with the children, and they had no idea where she was. I comforted Samuel in my lap, shrugging and passing apologetic glances to our buyer, who did not seem in the least put out but stared vacantly into space. Rose chattered by the window. Eventually Samuel calmed down in my lap, and Rose started to read a book, so we continued to work down the contract. Dawn finally returned and stayed long enough to say, “Sorry! They said there’s a tornado warning …” but at this word, Samuel began to scream again – Papa I’m scared of the tornado! – and I almost missed the rest of Dawn’s words. “… so I wanted to come home and find out if the pool was even open, but when I got out of the car there was a woman at the end of the street in a wheelchair yelling ‘Call 911.’ So I did, and I’m waiting for the ambulance. Oh, there it comes now!”

Samuel jumped down from my lap, and Rose and he both jumped up on the couch to peer out the window. When I turned back, Dawn was gone. “Papa, there’s an ambulance!” said my son, master of the obvious, all trace of panic gone at the sight of the flashing lights.

In time Dawn returned and took the children into the farthest back bedroom and closed the door. The buyer gave me an indulgent smile, and we laughed over the foibles of children. We finished up the contract, and I asked her to review it for errors before we took copies to our respective lawyers, hers as yet hypothetical.

“It looks good except for one part,” she said with a practiced, off-hand air, and a hesitancy in her voice. Her indifference on contractual points was now over, and she was about to drop the bomb over the only point she had ever cared about.

“Yes?” I asked, as obsequiously as I could manage.

“The selling price.”

“Let’s see,” I replied, taking the document from her hand. “Here it is, at the top.”

“Yes, I know, but we never spoke about price.”

“But you said you thought the selling price was reasonable.”

“Reasonable, yes, but I never said that that was what I was offering.”

“Oh,” I replied. And then, again, “Oh.” I was alarmed and angry and at the same time unwilling to admit either. “Well, what exactly are you offering?”

She smiled. I hadn’t said no. It was the smile of a high diver who, having leaped into oblivion, has left her anxieties behind on the board and is enjoying the thrill of reckless abandonment, and she continued to smile as she offered me her price.

 

Selling the House – Chapter 2

We continue our flashback series from Spring 2008, when we were selling our house.

We gave a local FSBO circular our blurb, our digital photos, and our money, several hundred dollars of it, and waited for the calls to come in. We did not know how long we should have to wait.

Our sense of our house’s desirability was balanced and counter-balanced by several factors: the sluggish national housing market, deflated by a sub-prime mortgage crisis in its infancy, lowered our expectations. The inoculation of New England real estate to national trends buoyed them. Our small town was upper middle class and white collar. Located in the mountains without a great deal of buildable land, housing in was generally scarce and expensive, even in a down market. Our particular house was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath house, in a market flooded with large, 4-6 bedroom Victorians. The national wisdom was that the buyer should have the pick of the litter, but this logic didn’t work locally where the litter was small. If you were looking for a house in our desirable little village, and you wanted to “size up,” then you had choices and room to bargain. But if you were a retiree, a a divorcee, a recently widowed or empty nester, if you were someone whom life had given a few kicks and you needed a smaller place to heal and start over, there weren’t a lot of options available in our market.

We intended to show the house on Sundays only, but the first caller abrasively shoved our faces against reality. In a tearing hurry, she made it clear that she had to see the house that very morning or not at all. We spent a furious hour cleaning the home, and then Dawn rushed the children down the stairs to the library as our prospective buyercame up the front steps. She spent ten minutes spent politely scanning the rooms before telling us that our home was well-priced but required more work that she was prepared to spend money on.

By the time indignation released its choking grasp on my wit, she was already in her car. I called out the front door, “You think it’s bad now, wait till you read the disclosure statement!” but my esprit d’escalier barely tarnished the chrome on her retreating bumper.

So it went. Random calls followed by frenetic, house-beautiful drills. Scrub the toilet and tub, wipe the toothpaste scum off the mirror and the dried urine off the back of the toilet where the three-year-old boy’s target practice failed, vacuum the carpets and remove any garbage, throw hundreds of small plastic, wood, metal, and paper toys into their appropriate boxes. Hustle the children off to a friend’s house, a sunny playground, or an air-conditioned library. The grand tour with a new set of strangers, lasting ten to thirty minutes, honing my patter and learning in time what to say and, more importantly, what not to say.

DO point out the hand-crafted built-in bookcase. DO point out the newly installed, energy-efficient oil furnace. Do NOT point out the couch on which your wife gave birth to your only son, nor regale them with the details of that particular story. People might buy a house with a dripping faucet, some peeling paint, even a vague, romantic ghost haunting on a full moon, but they do not want your physical and emotional baggage upstaging their mental revision of your home.

More people came by. Young professional unmarried couples, a single mother who had sold her home and needed a place within a month, a recently divorced gentleman able to pay cash but who eventually chose not to. No offers. I was pleased by the steady stream, but disappointed that the fish would not bite. We had had only one nibble, a single, retired woman who appreciated the large windows and quiet neighborhood and who envisioned blissful Sunday mornings spent with canvas and oil paints. But on a third visit, after wandering the premises with “the practical friend”, someone in the home construction line, doubts began to bubble up through the dreamy impressions. She stood in our front room at sunset and turned off the lights. The afternoon windows failed to light up the living room to a suitable level of Impressionistic splendor, and the love light in her eyes extinguished.

I had come to appreciate the brevity and candor of our very first visitor. She had been brutally candid, and once the stinging had subsided, I was able to see how valuable her critique had been. And she had only taken ten minutes of our time.

The landscaping grew shabbier. It rained every afternoon for days and days, so that the lawn was never dry enough to mow, but I took advantage of a dry weekend morning to climb on the roof with a steel-bristled painter’s scraper to remove lichen from the roof tiles on the shady side of the house. It was a slow, sweaty, uncomfortable job that ended before it was completed when there were no more steel bristles left on the brush. But the day remained dry, so the next afternoon I was outside with the mower and sheers, building up another cleansing sweat. The children cavorted outside, and Dawn took advantage of their absence to clean the highly-trafficked stairwell that connected the kitchen to the garage and doubled as a pantry. The walls were greasy and the stairs perpetually grimy from the tracked in dirt.

After an hour, Rose came running to find me behind the shade garden under the back yard trees adding trimmed branches to the brush pile.

“Mama wants you!” she called.

I heaved a sigh, hoisted my creaking frame, and pushed my glasses back up the bridge of my nose with the gloved back of my wrist. Trundling around to the front of the house, I left the shears on the rock wall and walked in the basement man door. The walls were damp and dripping, and Dawn was at the top of the stairs with a bucket of sudsy water and rubber gloves on, and her voice had the timbre of someone trying not to panic. “There are … um … sparks coming out of the light switches down there.” At the same time I saw the smoke.

The plate at the bottom of the stairs had three switches: one switch for the stairwell, one for the basement/garage, and one switch that had never done anything the whole time we lived in the house. Except for now. It lit up like a sparkler on the 4th of July, occasionally ejecting a narrow flame like the forked tongue of asnake flicking in and out.

Dawn grabbed the fire extinguisher and sprayed the light switch plate, which didn’t help because the fire was behind the plate. Fortunately the breaker box was around the corner, so I shut off the circuit, grabbed the extinguisher from her, and walked to the other side of the wall with the light switch. This was in the garage and there was no sheet rock on this wall. The switch box was exposed, and I put the nozzle right on an access hole in the switch box. I dowsed the inside until it filled with a noxious mustard yellow powder. In twenty seconds the sparking and fire was gone, leaving an acrid, gritty, musky stench in the air the settled on our tongues like a bad hangover. 

Fortunately, the metal switch box had contained the fire inside itself. The walls had not burned, nor even taken any smoke damage.

We vacuumed out the powder, and I rewired the box, replacing the aged, faulty switch that had never done a lick of work in its life and had not cared for the soapy bath Dawn had given it when her washing water had dripped down the walls and into its casing. The air was still redolent of burnt wiring insulation. Gritty yellow powder clung to the sweat on our faces and the saliva on our teeth. But when I flipped the new switch, the outdoor flood lights lit up the driveway.

 

Selling the House – Chapter 1

Now that I have time to catch up on my blog, here are a few articles about the process of selling our house earlier this year.

The disclaimer form, required by law and painfully thorough, presented a long checklist of possible house defects observed within the past four years, with Yes, No, and Unknown checkboxes. And while “Unknown” was a possible answer to any question, it was not always the proper answer, either legally or morally. If the defect was known, if for example you had hired people to address the problem and then left behind a trail of signed contracts and payments by check, you ought to check Yes and explain yourself. There were only so many electricians and plumbers and pest control companies serving a town of 8,000, so you weren’t likely to hide the fact for long.  Besides, the house was sixty years old, so a sheet stating no knowledge of any defects would have been highly suspicious. And we are honest people. Desperate to sell a house in a buyers market, true, but not so desperate as to prevaricate.

For example, we confessed that there had been carpenter ants. I wrote out a succinct account, a bare sentence or two, describing the removal of the rotting deck, the destruction of the nest by a professional exterminator, and the truthful, though admittedly unverifiable, fact that they had not been seen again since. I had fulfilled my legal and ethical requirements.

But that was not the complete story.

Four years earlier, soon after we moved in to the house, the foam ceiling tiles in the master bedroom began to loosen and fall off the ceiling. We removed them all and arranged for a carpenter to come and sheetrock the ceilings. He was not available for a month, so for weeks the dirty, gray attic insulation above our heads gave the room a disreputable air, but it was securely held up by clear plastic sheeting stapled to the ceiling joists which gently flapped up and down whenever a breeze whistled through the attic eaves. It was a temporary arrangement we were willing to live with.

Because we did not know about the carpenter ants. Because the previous owners did not disclose them (under pest issues on their disclaimer form, they had checked Unknown). It was late Spring and they were hatching in the rigid insulation of the outer walls. They are nocturnal, and at night they crawled into the house through convenient gaps in the plastic sheeting over our heads that we had provided. Hundreds of them. 

A single ant is a symbol of insignificance, but a hundred ants exploring a house in the dead of night makes a sound to freeze your flesh and fill a lifetime of nightmares. The clicking of their mandibles as they prowled the house combined with an occasional nip on our legs or heads in bed lent a surreal horror to our now-insomnial nights. We kept all our food in tightly sealed containers and slept, huddled together, on couches in the living room, where they rarely ventured.

We could have doused the house with professionally-applied, chemical insecticide, and the ants would have been mostly gone in days, but our newborn Samuel spent much of his day indoors, and we did not like the idea of his developing brain tainted with poisonous petrochemicals. We opted instead for gel bait – a concentrated poison in gel form laced with sugar that the ants carry back to their nest. It is a safer and more effective than spraying, but it takes weeks to kill the entire nest. On the other hand, it does kill the entire nest, completely eradicating it, something the spray isn’t guaranteed to do. It had one other advantage over insecticide spray that we did not expect; carpenter ants cart off and eat their dead. As the dropped off one by one, the corpses disappeared almost as soon as they expired, leaving no mess for us to clean up. By the end of two weeks, the house was eerily, morbidly silent at night, and we moved back into our bedrooms, fatigue having overcome trepidation and loathing.

Four years later, when it came time to sell the house, there was not enough space on the disclaimer form to elaborate these supererogatory details.

 

Gunfire

Saturday morning we woke to the sound of gunfire, a heavy explosive noise that somehow compressed and released the air in the room. Like a door slamming inches from your face, it was a sound that made you flinch and then take a inventory of your body parts for bruises and holes. It woke Sam, though he was probably already awake, lying on a small palette of pillows and sheets next to our bed. He is a night waker who seeks the comfort of our presence at two in the morning. He is also a twitcher and kicker whose has been banished numerous times from our bed, so the palette is a compromise. It allows him to sleep in the room with us when he needs to, but it does not require him to wake us. Unless of course, someone is firing a gun.

“Mama? What’s that noise? Mama, Papa. I heard something.”

He was reasonably calm, probably more calm than we were because he has little idea what it could be and because we hide our feelings better. It’s barely light outside, and soon Rose came in from the children’s bedroom too.  She is six years old, which is an age of intellectual rebellion, a foretaste of adolescence, and as a late sleeper, she is usually surly most mornings having not yet discovered coffee. But not this morning. With a tinge of concern she was about to ask what that sound was, when suddenly we heard it again. Four loud explosions, two close together and two more staccato, that echo off the houses, garages, and trees. I was fully awake now. They did not appear to be directed at us, but they were close enough to rattle the windows on the far side of the house. Could they be coming from the lake?

Aloud, we suggested hunters and left unsaid any other possibilities that might upset the children and frighten ourselves. After all, this was rural Indiana. What other possible explanation was there? A couple of months earlier, we heard a single gunshot down the road while driving home that proved to be a neighbor ridding himself of a undesirable rodent, but unless this was a near-sighted octogenarian with a persistent and deaf ground hog, there were too many shots for that explanation. A domestic dispute was hardly likely, even among the few remaining tough retirees who chose not to migrate back to Fort Wayne for the winter. It was early December, too early for cabin fever – the weather had barked more than bitten. There was a meaningless dusting of snow still frosting the lawn and a thin sheen of ice had licked the edges of the lake. Gang warfare was out of the question. Most of the people beyond the lake were farmers, half of them Mennonites. And I was reminded of a joke.

Q. What is this? “Clip clop clip clop clip clop. BANG! BANG! Clip clop clip clop.”

A. An Amish drive-by shooting.

I kept this one to myself.

Dawn got out of bed and walked to the front of the house, meaning the side facing the lake, not the street. When you live on a small body of water, with houses crowding the shore in French long lots around the entire perimeter, the lake itself is the center of the community, not the various approach roads snaking about like veins. I was fully awake now and I followed but turned to the back of the house, because the front of our house was twenty feet from the water, and, product of the suburbs that I was, I could not conceive of someone swimming out into the water to fire a gun.

“It must be duck season,” I heard Dawn call from the other side of the house, and we all headed to the lake side parlor to watch a canoe paddler in camouflage green glide past our window. He slowed down and picked up a dead bird which he casually tossed, the feathers streaming an arc of lake water into the air, before landing on a large pile of fowl corpses in the front of the canoe. Scanning the 180 degree view, we spied a large collection of decoys at the south east corner of the lake, laid out in front of the cattails.  The canoe headed slipped back into the cattails and disappeared behind a duck blind.

“Come on kids,” I said. “I’d like you to stay out of the lake room this morning.”

The lake room is the best room in the house, with a grand view, a CD player, the current peck of library books, and the most comfortable couches in the house, but the children made no fuss. Like me, they were paranoid of the unknown. The hunters weren’t aiming at the houses. Yet. I am a believer in not tempting fate.

I was also mildly peeved at the interruption to my sleep. Because of Jewish services and religious school, it we don’t get to sleep in really late on Saturday mornings, but at least we get an extra hour or two compared to the work week. Not that morning. And I liked the ducks, even though they pooped on the docks all summer, and I was sorry they were so near-sighted or love-sick or hungry or tired or just plain stupid to fly over Pretty Big Long Lake on a Saturday morning in duck season.

 

Staff Meeting

The announcement of a staff meeting in our office is always an unexpected diversion. Deadlines may prevent any gathering for up to half a year, only to overcorrect this lack of communication with a frenzy of weekly meetings that leave us exhausted and incommunicative. The pattern is oddly similar to my wife’s estrogen cycle before she had children. Both ought to have occurred monthly but did not. Both vanished without a trace with the application of sufficient environmental stress. Both were unpleasant facts of life, but accepted in the natural order of the world. When they appeared, we cheered the break from the mounting tedium, and when they were over, we cheered even louder. And they have one other thing inexplicably in common: after my vasectomy, I stopped fretting about them.

Yesterday’s staff meeting arrived with no warning at all, though I should confess that the fault may have been my own inattention. I received a message in our company chat room informing everyone that the sales team was meeting at 1:00 PM. Forty-five minutes later, I received a personal IM message politely inquiring when I was going to join. As a computer programmer, I am usually not considered part of the sales team, but I dialed in anyway.

We gathered in the meeting room in Seattle, a speaker phone as my proxy. We are a friendly cohort in general, but there was an additional comradery. We had not met as a company for several months, scourged and repressed by two very large and late projects which had superceded our virtual conversations around the water cooler.

They were now complete, after a fashion. Our projects are never truly complete, but they do get delivered, or at least, they sit on our network disks in a deliverable format until the client remembers they want them. If that sounds odd, consider that there are usually three clients involved in the process.

The first person is someone from the Business Office who really doesn’t understand software, who is blissfully ignorant of the technical details, but who is responsible for providing the purchase order. In theory, we are not obliged to start a project without a PO. The PO is the client’s written promise to pay us when we deliver. Thus it makes no sense to deliver, or even begin construction, until we have a PO in hand. In theory, we could complete an entire software project, deliver and install it, and send someone from our office to sit in one their cubicles and run it for them (and we have done all these things at times), and still the client wouldn’t have to pay us unless we got the PO. So when we are especially busy, not having a PO would certainly offer a good excuse for delaying a project, which in theory would be awfully convenient at times, and very legally, though perhaps not strictly (ahem) ethical. So much for theory. The reality is that they PO is always late, sometimes months late, sometimes even years late, and often the best way to get the PO delivered is to call the business office and tell them that the project is done, sitting in our mail room, gathering dust and (worse yet) growing obsolete.

The second person involved is someone from the Information Technology Department. This person is responsible for installing and running the code. This person is usually the overworked, underpaid guru of the organization, though just as often they are a hapless and incompetent victim of the Peter Principle. In either case, once the code is delivered to them, it will sit on their desk until they have time to install it. The amount of time varies enormously.

The third person is a middle manager who ordered the project in the first place. This person is the only one who cares, who wanted the code yesterday, who calls every week or every day to see how the project is coming along, who name appears on our caller ID more and more frequently as deadline approaches. They are usually the person who can motivate the other two people to action once the code is deliverable.

So at the beginning of our staff meeting, there were two such projects, one delivered and one deliverable, and life was sweet. The conversation around the table bubbled. Not a single person had a monkey on their back. Those clients whose every whim must be catered and who sadistically provide our provender, they now had the monkeys on their backs, those capricious and obnoxious project monkeys, fond of throwing their excrement about as monkeys will do.

Our meetings are usually round-robin presentations. Our boss then summarizes and brings up topics germaine to the company as a whole. There were two new employees, swelling our ranks by 25%, so that the meeting ended up taking more time than usual. My proxy phone huddled in the corner, occasionally making a noise of consent in chorus with the others, or even an obnoxious buzz whenever a client called for help cleaning monkey excrement, but otherwise remaining quiet and unobtrusive. By dint of which, I successfully avoided my turn and shaved perhaps five minutes off the meeting.

Then our boss did something uncommon. He gave us an overview of the current financial sector melt down as he saw it, what he thought would happen in the future, both to the world as a whole and to our company in particular. He had studied this sort of thing in school and followed it diligently in the papers. He used a word – “engaging” or “fascinating” or such – that conveyed his enthusiasm for the the topic without appearing callous at the suffering of million of homeless innocents. He reminded us that the company had been through tough times before with 9-11 and the dotcom bust, and he thought we would weather this storm too. In the past, we had become Hoovermatics, sucking up every crumb of project work available and getting any dime a customer might have to spend before someone else got it, because there wasn’t likely to be a second dime. It wasn’t to that point now, though clearly he thought the situation would worsen before improving. Even if it did get that bad, he didn’t anticipate any lay offs.

Then he solicited general comments. There are two MBAs on staff with a third on the way, and several intelligent, childless employees who have time to read the New York Times through page C34 every day. They all had opinions. This was before the election, and some mentioned the problems that would face the Next president, whomever that might be. Others mentioned quieter events in the world that indicated the magnitude of the problem more than the front page articles. Ten minutes later we still dissecting the corpse of the American financial establishment, when my boss said, “Harry, are you still there?”

I stopped trimming my fingernails.

“I sure am.”

“Have you any comments to offer?”

“Umm. Not really. Except to say, that I’m glad I sold my house when I did, which was about two months before the bottom fell out, and glad I moved to a place with one of the cheapest costs of living in the US.”

There was an uncomfortable silence on the phone, and I realized that at least one person in the room had recently bought a house which was already worth tens of thousands of dollars less than what he paid for it. I bit my lip, which was a neat trick with my foot in my mouth, but of course you can’t see that on a conference phone.

“Yes,” said my boss. “You know, I really need to consult with you about business decisions more often.”

 

The Lake

We live right on a lake, which for the purposes of the journal I shall call Pretty Big Lake. I had always dreamed of living by the ocean, not a lake. A lake is a small community, confining and insular, whereas no contemplation is too large for an ocean view. I someday envisioned myself on the strand of the Atlantic or Pacific, in white canvas trousers and a windbreaker, watching the white foam of the surging waves, one hand in a pocket and the other holding a mug of tea (though I hardly ever drink tea), and the forlorn cry of a gull occasionally breaking into my profound philosophizing. But really, the thoughts of a sleep deprived parent are fairly banal, and a lake is more than adequate for reflection.

The lake is as nearly round as a natural lake could be and abundant in its variety throughout the seasons. On a clear day, after the morning vapors have dispersed, you can scan the shore and see the piers of all one hundred of your neighbors, a huddled fraternity of planking invading the domain of the lily pads, cat tails, and duck weed. With a strong arm, you can toss a pebble from the back door at least fifty yards off the shore and watch it settle into the greasy, black mud and startle the translucent blue and green fish, each no longer than your finger. The water is clean and crystal clear. It does not get deeper than your knees for a long distance. You could easily walk out and retrieve your stone. The mud would stir and swirl as you passed, filling the water like the ink of a frightened octopus. Admittedly, the prehistoric slime on the soles of your bare foot is an acquired taste, and no doubt an ocean shore would feel more salubrious, but I doubt there is affordable ocean-side property left in this country, whereas the lake and we are as close as tenement neighbors.

The legal speed limit on the lake is 10 miles per hour. You may swim, paddle, peddle, sail, motor, or captain any vehicle if you do not exceed 10 miles per hour. The de facto enforcer is the Department of Natural Resources who maintains the quality of the water and public boat launch, but de jure it is the good opinion of the folks who live here, many of them year round, and who fish this lake in a sustainable manner. You may rev your jet ski up to 9.99 miles per hour, but if you scare the fish away with your loathsome noise and acrid exhaust, I would not vouch for the integrity of your truck tires left behind at the boat launch. I’m not saying I know anyone personally who would do this, but slashing happens. 

Altogether, it is the perfect lake for teaching my nervous, uncoordinated children how to swim. From the dock they can see through the clear water and watch the fish shadows darken the sandy veneer over the mud. They can wade in slowly, wetting ankles, shins, knees, thigh, bottoms, and bellies at a slow crawl from the shore to the end of the dock to which they cling. They leave trails of dark mud clouds behind them, like the stirred dregs of unfiltered tea in a cup. They can float, swim, kick, splash about, and they need only settle their feet on the bottom and stand up to feel safe. Samuel could even stand in the water at the end of the dock with his head easily above water, not that he would ever venture out that far.

Rose on the other hand is braver. She considered herself a swimmer before we moved here, though she cannot swim the length of a bathtub. That does not stop her. She snaps on her goggles, ducks her head under, thrashes her legs and one arm (the other arm pinching her nose tightly) and propels herself a noisy five feet before standing up, spitting copiously, and wiping the water from her face and eyes with her hands.

“Did you see me swimming?” she crows and jumps in again.

This only recently, since the very day we arrived in Indiana, she broke her arm, and for six weeks could not get the cast wet. The water was cold now, and though the days can still get up to the 70’s, the nighttime thermometer had already flirted once with the freezing point. The children understood that swimming days were numbered, and they did not miss an opportunity to be outside and in the water.

Of course we had set rules, the more important being that no one may go on the dock or in the water without an adult present. This rule had only been challenged twice, each time resulting in an immediate cessation of outdoor play followed by a prolonged, grating, spiteful period of complaint, not unlike that of disturbed mallards. But since then, we had not had any rule breaking.

Last weekend, the temperature was warm, though not quite warm enough for swimming. The children asked very nicely to play in the sand instead, and I agreed to go out with them. No swimsuits. Just pails and shovels and a plastic two handled cup formerly used for ritual handwashing. The children launched from the door like uncaged animals, shrieking and running for five minutes before settling down to the first of many plans of action. As a family, we really spend too much time indoors, and we all quickly forget how expansive the outside world is. Buckets of water were brought to the sand pit for castle and cake making. I yelled reminders. No running onto the dock and don’t step barefoot in the duck poop.

“Papa, can we sweep it off the dock?”

“Yes. Go get the broom.”

Rose returned and make a good first pass, but the broom was too large for her, so I took a turn. I was nearly done with the first dock (there are two) when I heard a scream and a splash, followed by even more screaming. I looked up and saw Samuel’s head – wet, miserable, spluttering, screaming my name - rising above the far side of the other dock.  Rose was manic, running towards me, babbling, unstrung, abandoning Samuel.

“Papa! Papa! Come quick! Samuel fell in the water and it’s my fault!” and she bursts into tears.

Clearly, no one was in immediate danger of drowning. Samuel stood in the lake with water up to his chest about ten feet from the shore. He could walked back to shore and inside the house and ordered some towels and a cup of hot tea had he the presence of mind, but of course at three years old he did not. I hustled over to the other dock and pulled him out. The sun was shining and the air was reasonably warm, so I stripped off his soaking shirt, while he spat out lake water.

“Papa! Rose pushed me in the lake!”

Rose rushed over to explain. It was all her fault, she confessed with unusual and vehement candor. She had been running down the dock (breaking rule number 2), and tried to run around Samuel, but through an act of simultaneous uncoordination, unlikely in theory but strangely common to my children, they bumped into each other instead. That was the whole story, but it took her about five minutes to say it clearly. Meanwhile I calmed Samuel down and herded him to the house where Dawn, having heard the noise and divined the problem, was waiting with towels and fresh clothes.

“Papa! Rose pushed me in the lake!”

“Well, Samuel, I think it was an accident,” and then I gently reminded Rose that regardless, she owed Sam an apology. Parental reminders like these, no matter how sensitively given, inspire rote, insincere responses which were delivered with a noticeable lack of attention.

“Imsorrysamuel.”

“Thatsokayrose.”

Then turning to me, Joseph added, “Papa, Rose pushed me into the lake.”

He repeated this a dozen more times while we stripped him, bathed him, and changed his clothes. He was not angry or upset with Rose. The repetition was simply an attempt to make sense of an acute, systemic insult that arrived without warning. But Rose took it as accusation, and having uncharacteristically confessed her crime, she was now without recourse to deny it. So instead she kept bursting into tears and talking. We assured her that Samuel was perfectly fine, that she was not in trouble, that it was an understandable accident. But she couldn’t stop talking about it anyway.

As a child, I earned the nickname Motor Mouth because I often gave a complete narration of my thoughts with an interrupting commentary that came out as a great many incomplete sentences at high speed. I’m sure I was incomprehensible, but I had not yet developed a filter in my brain to keep thoughts inside. I believe my daughter has inherited this defect. When she gets going, it is difficult to pay attention to much or even anything she is saying. As Tom Lehrer once said, “If a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to Shut Up.” But her intensity over this event was so dramatic and persistent, even for a six year old, that I listened with as much attention as I could muster over the cross-grain of Samuel’s own repetitive chatter.

Which is why, for once, I did not miss her key sentence.

“But Papa! I thought … I thought … I thought Samuel had drowned!”

In retrospect, this was obvious, but at the time, it had seemed so comical to me that I did not appreciate how deadly serious it had seemed to Hannah. Fortunately for Hannah, I am no longer a Motor Mouth, and I have that filter installed in my mind. I swallowed the first words that came to me (that’s why we keep telling you not to run on the docks!) and instead pulled her into a hug and said simply, “Your brother didn’t drown. He’s perfectly OK, and he was never in any danger.”

She clung to me and soaked my shoulder with warm, noisy tears. I felt that, on the one hand, I had said the right thing to her, or had at least not said the wrong thing. But on the other hand, I grew up with only brothers, not sisters, and I really wondered if I would ready in six years for parenting a teenage girl.